News

We’re Moving to Ferndale

If you’ve kept up with us to any extent the last six months or so, finding a new location to roast has been on the top of our priority list. Because we are currently working out of Noah’s house roasting coffee, we are operating under Cottage Food Law, which severely limits what we can do: no wholesale, no brewing and selling cups, no online sales. Selling beans directly to consumers is really all we can do. It’s been a great way to start, but it’s time we move on to something bigger. Enter Alleah and her shop Drifter Coffee.

Credit: Joe Tiano

For how this came about, we need to look at the start of Gooseneck Coffee Co. When we started our company, the vision was to brew coffee at farmers markets and events, not roasting our own coffee. In those early stages of Gooseneck, Noah sat down with Alleah to talk about her business and we struck up a friendship that continues three years later. We’ve progressed into roasting and through help from our Kickstarter backers and customers in Plymouth, we’ve grown and purchased a bigger roaster. We have always thought of Drifter Coffee as a potential company that would serve our coffee. Alleah works her butt off, has sweet vibes we love, and is an all–around decent human. In January of this year, Alleah said she was opening a coffee shop in Ferndale, so naturally we reached out to congratulate her and see if we could potentially work with her in the future. Little did either of us know what was coming (except maybe Bill, who made an off-handed comment about roasting for her 🙂 ).

The very next month we met with Alleah to discuss our futures and what working together might look like. What we didn’t realize was that Alleah was about to offer us exactly what we needed: a place to roast. Since her coffee shop building is zoned manufacturing, she needs to produce a certain amount of the goods sold on-site. This means she’ll need to roast to produce coffee on-site to sell in her shop. But until now, she hasn’t spent time roasting nor does she have a roaster. Enter us. She invited us to bring our brand new roaster to her shop in Ferndale (about 10 miles northwest of the heart of Detroit) and be Drifter’s “in-house” coffee roasters. We wereamazed at how perfect it could be for both parties. We get a place to roast from, which means more opportunities for us to grow and on top of that, Drifter will serve our coffee on a daily basis.Alleah and the Drifter team will work alongside us to craft unique coffees and blends offered only at their shop.

Off of Woodward Heights in the Iron Ridge neighborhood just outside of downtown Ferndale, there’s a little mushroom house, and soon enough, it will be decorated with plenty of greenery and crystals. Everything is already getting underway to make that the new home of Drifter Coffee. It’s an older building in need of some TLC, but things are already coming together. Recently demolition began and construction will start shortly after that.The building itself is two stories that will have plenty of seating especially on the second floor. We’ll be roasting in a greenhouse-style building attached to the main building, which also has places to sit and room to host events.

The next few months are going to be wild and we can’t wait until we’re able to share in this experience with everyone. We expect to be settled in at Drifter by this autumn, but in the meantime you can still find us at the Plymouth Farmers Market. We’ll do our best to keep you posted on where you can find and enjoy some Drifter Coffee too!